According to the related art, since a capsule or a tablet having an elliptical or circular cross-section may be produced in large quantities through an automated process, a defect is commonly generated during a discharging process, rather than defects caused due to components or dosages thereof.
Accordingly, a process of inspecting an external defect such as a crack, partial damage, deformation, or a printing defect, caused by adhesion of a foreign substance or contamination, contact between tablets, impacts, or the like, has been required.
A process of inspecting an appearance of a tablet has been changing from a visual inspection performed by an operator to an automatic inspection using an automatic inspection apparatus. Various types of automatic inspection apparatuses for such automatic inspection have been proposed.
In a case of automatically inspecting a tablet using an automatic inspection apparatus, a tablet is imaged by a camera while the tablet is being transferred, so an image of one side surface of the tablet is obtained. Moreover, while a tablet's aspect is reversed and the tablet is transferred, the other side surface of the tablet is imaged by a camera. Thereafter, images of one side, a front surface, and the other side, a rear surface, of the tablet are processed, so the presence or absence of a defect may be inspected, a process described above was adopted in the related art.
An example of such a technique is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-51873. The example is related to a tablet appearance inspection apparatus, and components thereof from a hopper to a feeder, a side surface inspection drum, an aspect conversion drum, a surface inspection drum, a rear surface inspection drum, and a discharge nozzle, are arranged vertically (in a height direction of the tablet appearance inspection apparatus).
Thus, the tablet appearance inspection apparatus is designed to be high on the whole, so that it is unnecessarily large in size. When an operator directly provides a tablet to be inspected to a hopper, the operator should stand in an elevated position, so a problem in which a worker's workload and the risk of accidents are increased may occur.